Beyond Protocol – First impressions

With the rarity of MMORTS games on the market and even more rare 4x Empired Building MMO Game (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) the indie developers from Dark Sky Entertainment have come with a highly customized and entertaining 4x MMO Game, Beyond Protocol.

We started the game by creating our empire name, customizing the colors of the empire and flag. Here we can also introduce our email once again for alerts, a neat feature where it sends mail when you are attacked or other important things are happening with your empire.

Tutorial Colony

After we landed on the tutorial planet and a cute English women voice started to introduced us with the tutorial to establish a colony, we encountered some NPC pirates and an unknown mineral, and from here began a complex system that we were astonished of the amount of details that is found here. While we discovered this unknown mineral, we employed our scientists to research and from here we started to design our new hulls for tanks and configuring the new hull for new tank. We continued to employ officers for our factory to start to produce our new prototype tank with the metal we just discovered and research, and based on hull and armor we designed trough the interface. Many people, the casual people will probably get lost here, but fans of the Empire Games like Master of Orion, Mankind and others, will enjoy this. At the same we found out that our colony is formed of course from people and their happiness and skills will help you develop your empire and get money from taxes.

While we started to build more structures to develop our colony further, we were taught how to employ an a gent to scout for the pirate base on this planet, to destroy it. We prepared our assault force of tanks, and waited for our agent to discover and infiltrate the pirate base. After we destroyed the enemy factory, our agents told us that the pirate presence on the planet we are, it’s too powerful so we will need a contingency plan where we are advised to defend our Command Center until the colonist are transferred, and man we were attacked by ground, and air by these pirates until finally we ran away. After this we choose to go directly to the live servers, and now our empire grows.

My first colony, i named it Beer Heaven.

The game has more content then what we experienced from the tutorial, imagine being able to build colonies from scratch on planets from the solar systems available, trading and opening relations with other players, forging and destroying empires, in persistent world that lives when you are not in game too, but thank God we receive emails if something bad happens, which is great.

Games like Beyond Protocol are targeted to a relative small audience, where people like to go in every detail, in our case developing an empire, researching materials and new technology, designing ground, air, and space units, and conquering solar systems for power and glory, alone or with an alliance. The only big problem I found is the interface which needs a lot of working, since it’s not very user friendly or accessible and its plain ugly.

In the end this game has a lot of potential and every time we play it, it gets better and better, and while it won’t appeal to many people, it has and will develop a dedicated fan base, and probably will survive well financially and as a good MMORTS/4x game.